Jonathan D. Glater

Published: February 23, 2005

At Johnson & Johnson, the director of equal opportunity was worried. The company, she warned in a memo written in the late 1990’s…had “areas of vulnerability” to employment discrimination lawsuits. 

 

As it turned out, she was right. And the memo, written by Maria Hochberg Smith and intended to prod Johnson & Johnson…into making improvements, could now end up serving as an unintended legal weapon against it. …   

 

The suit does not claim that the company simply refused to hire the employees who are the plaintiffs, but that executives knew years ago that they were missing their targets for promoting such employees—and did little to solve the problem. …

 

“We believe that both prior to and after the filing of the lawsuit, there have been voices in the company that have wanted to address the issue of disparities on the basis of race, but those voices have largely been silenced,” saidCyrus Mehri, whose law firm of Mehri & Skalet is representing the plaintiffs. “My view is that they are a company in desperate need of statesmanship on the issue of race”…

 

According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, the percentage of Johnson & Johnson senior executives who were African-American or Hispanic actually fell in the years before the lawsuit was filed…

 

After the lawsuit was filed, the percentage of African-American executive hires rose from zero in 2000 to 12.5 percent in 2002, according to testimony by a company executive…